In adapting George Orwell’s 1984 for its current stage production (at the Hudson Theatre), the writer-directors Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan have chosen to begin at an unusual place in the text: the end. To be more specific: the appendix. Icke and Macmillan think the appendix is the key to the whole novel.
Were you even aware 1984 has an appendix? I’m not sure you were. You may not have noticed it. Entitled Principles of Newspeak, this coda is a pastiche of a boring scholarly note explaining the idiosyncrasies of Big Brother’s preferred language. Yet it is dated 2050, and these numerals mark the end of the book. What jumps out to Icke and Macmillan, and it is a clever notion, is that the appendix is itself written in what we might, to coin a retronym, call Oldspeak. Newspeak, the appendix’s author makes clear, belongs to the past. So some time between 1984 and 2050, Large Sibling’s regime was defeated and ordinary freedoms were restored, with the power of freedom to speak clearly lighting the way to the others. In 2017 we are exactly halfway between these two dates. Nifty, eh?
There is a disease rampaging through the theater that I call directoritis.
Well, not really. Does not the power of 1984derive jointly from those aspects that carry the sting of contemporaneity—thought police, doublespeak—as well as its looming cautionary gravitas, doomy harbingers? There is little doubt that the Stalinism of which Orwell’s book warned was
